If it's not open it's broken.

Four ways #DEBill will fail.

[Note that I’m making liberal use of the Twitter hashtag #DEBill in place of “Digital Economy Bill” — if you want to keep up to speed on this I encourage you to do the same…]

So it seems that the UK’s Digital Economy Bill is now all but certain to be passed into law. From all accounts the critical second reading was a pretty poor showing for democracy — literally, as just a handful of Britain’s 600-plus MPs were there to debate it.

Pretty much a given, right? Technology moves faster than any government (or big media cartel) and those in the know are already prepared to flip the switch and disappear off the grid, where they’ll be exponentially harder to find.

So much for that.

II. Britain will be punished.

I don’t mean a distributed attack, per se — although that’s already been proposed by a devious user of Digg. What I mean is that connected travellers might give second thought to visiting the UK in the first place.

Let’s face it, Britain isn’t exactly the cheapest place for a holiday to begin with, and if you couldn’t use the WiFi at your bed & breakfast because the owners would be liable for what you were doing online wouldn’t you at least consider a stay somewhere else?

Passing DEBill right before an election is called might well end up biting a few guilty parties in the ass. A comprehensive list of how MPs voted has already been published, along with a way to check if yours even bothered to show up.

The UK Pirate Party is certainly primed to enjoy a surge in popularity, and at the very least the Open Rights Group stands to gain a lot of new members and support.

IV. We’ll get our media elsewhere, thanks.

This would be my favourite outcome by far. If the Brits formerly known as file sharers would collectively boycott big media dreck and put their hard-earned cash behind projects like Pioneer One instead I would be thrilled — and the innovative artists creating such things would be pretty happy too, I imagine.

Tor is pretty slow. I ran a node for years while living in Florida. Now that I have roommates and the network isn’t wholly mine, I stopped the node.

In any case, I suspect torrent users will move to encryption before Tor. Tor may be necessary, as well, but most of the techniques I know of require some sort of packet inspection if done at the ISP layer. The only thing encryption does not defend against is copyright owners trolling on the network and logging who sends them the data. There was an article recently about how most of those lawsuits are flawed, but I can’t find the link right now.

Tor is pretty slow. I ran a node for years while living in Florida. Now that I have roommates and the network isn’t wholly mine, I stopped the node.

In any case, I suspect torrent users will move to encryption before Tor. Tor may be necessary, as well, but most of the techniques I know of require some sort of packet inspection if done at the ISP layer. The only thing encryption does not defend against is copyright owners trolling on the network and logging who sends them the data. There was an article recently about how most of those lawsuits are flawed, but I can’t find the link right now.

I believe that in France, where piracy continues unabated despite the three-strikes law there, RapidShare is the tool of choice — and because it’s a direct download via http (port 80?) it’s fairly impervious to deep packet inspection.

I believe that in France, where piracy continues unabated despite the three-strikes law there, RapidShare is the tool of choice — and because it’s a direct download via http (port 80?) it’s fairly impervious to deep packet inspection.